How a Shopping Mall Becomes a Killing Zone

Terrorist incidents tell us nothing new about human nature. We already knew that people are capable of horrendous violence, especially when they have come to regard some other subset of human beings as unworthy of full human status. It’s not surprising, then, to see the terrorists of Somalia’s loathsome al-Shabaab movement violating all laws of humanity by slaughtering innocent victims of all ages. People can become monsters, and they did in the Nairobi mall attack that began on September 21.

What really is alarming, though, is to see terrorists create a radical new tactic against which there is no obvious response or defense. There was nothing surprising, for instance, in the idea that terrorists might hijack airliners, but only in 2001 did we realize that hijackers might use them for suicide attacks, turning those aircraft into deadly missiles. Nairobi has just shown us another horrible innovation. It might be that we won’t realize how effective this could be against the U.S. until we face yet another day when we are counting the dead in their hundreds. We have to confront this issue immediately.

Think about it. How would one attack a shopping mall, whether in Nairobi or Minneapolis? Presumably a number of pickup trucks draw up in the parking lot, and 20 or so armed men and women get out, carrying their weapons and ammunition. Then they enter the mall and begin killing until they can do no more harm. They are strictly limited by the number of bullets and grenades they can carry. When police and military forces arrive, the terrorists might hold out for an hour or two before being eliminated.

That’s one way to do it, but it’s clearly not what happened in Nairobi, where firefights were still in progress several days after the initial assault. Even more amazing, terrorists were still putting up resistance against strong Kenyan forces, reputedly trained and assisted by British and Israeli special forces.

How on earth did the terrorists do it? Why, they rented a store.

They rented a store.

Several months before the attack, possibly a year, they rented a property in Nairobi’s Westgate mall and began a business. All the while, they were using the property to store huge quantities of ammunition, explosives, and grenades. When the terrorists eventually arrived for the deadly day, they already had a fully equipped arsenal on the premises. And they had spent months learning all the mall’s vulnerabilities, all the best places to set ambushes. It’s nothing short of brilliant.

The tactic must also be gravely worrying for U.S. agencies that have to be thinking very hard about whether—or when—it could happen here. Is there a giant mall in Los Angeles or Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. where some ordinary-looking people took out a lease last year and then ran it quietly and inoffensively, attracting little attention? And where, in the interim, they have been preparing an arsenal in preparation for some key day when shoppers show up in droves?

Assume this is true, that such a plot might be in the works in this country or in Western Europe. How on earth could it be prevented? Airline hijackings can be prevented, or at least limited, by stringent security precautions and searches. But preventing a prospective mall attack like I am describing? No, there’s no point in beginning background checks on every new business owner in America, not least because the people signing the leases would have squeaky-clean records. Nor, obviously, would focusing on Middle Eastern names or foreign citizens be at all useful in spotting the likely terrorists. While this is still controversial, at least some of the al-Shabaab death squads in Nairobi were white, and several were British or U.S. citizens.

The only possible form of pre-emption I can see involves sophisticated intelligence and surveillance.

If we are not very careful indeed, then some year soon, the phrase “Black Friday” could have a whole different meaning.

It’s kind of airbrushed out of history now, but the anthrax scare of late 2001 really freaked people out. Always seemed to me that attacks over a couple weeks on malls in Boise, Kissimmee, and Amarillo would practically shut down commerce.

That nothing like that has happened here indicated to me that al Qaeda doesn’t have all that many people who were able to get in and live here like the hijackers did.

Plausible that it could happen in the US, but not so in Europe, where weapons and explosives are much harder to get hold of. Not sure why a terrorist attack on a mall should be considered more frightening then a disgruntled teen doing something similar at his school?

Perhaps not admitting Somalis and others from the religion of peace into our republic would be a good idea. Deportation of those already sending their sons off to fight in Jihad would be another. Another step might be in encouraging Americans to exercise their 2nd Amendment right to self defense by carrying their private arms.

If such an attack happened in a New York mall it would go on for hours. A similar attack taking place states beyond the Hudson wouldn’t go so smoothly. Terrorists would find it less easy shooting citizens if even a tiny number of those citizens were shooting back.

The authorities have been puzzled for some time as to why not such a mall attack hasn’t happen already. Let’s not give the bastards ideas.

There is an easy way to prevent it: gun rights. There was that small scale shooting in an Oregon mall last year. The shooter got two people before a gun carrying citizen backed him into a stairwell, where he killed himself. Who wants to bet that Kenya has heavy gun control and little gun culture? All it would take is a few armed citizens to stop it and the presence of armed citizens to prevent it.

A terrorist attack on a mall, Raashid, is much more frightening than an attack on a school since a mall attack deters other shoppers from spending their money at great American institutions like Nordstrom, Tiffany, and Sears. All that a terrorist attack on a school does is deter other kids from learning the Pythagorean Theorem and reading Shakespeare.

Raashid, not plausible in Europe? You mean even with the attack in Toulouse? Breivik in Norway? Weapons are in fact readily available in Europe and they are much more vulnerable due to the heavy restrictions. Even Japan with its strict control has seen terror attacks.

Malls can certainly refuse its tenants the right to bring and store weaponry on their premises and retain the right at any time, to inspect their tenant’s leaseholds for compliance. This won’t stop all attacks but will take away the option of having a limitless supply of weapons. Allowing the public, including store employees, to carry their own weapons on their persons will help assure that any attack will not go uncontested until police forces arrive. There are no perfect ways of preventing such violence, but one certain to fail would be further attempts to take guns out of the hands of the general public.

Gee, it sure would have been nice if, before plunging us into one side of a fight on the other side of the world in which we had no real interest and in which both sides had practiced terrorism if our policy-makers had spent even one hour considering the seriousness of that partisan involvement almost certainly inviting terrorism here with all its potential.

Or if our media and/or public commentariat and/or even our foreign affairs community had ever observed that danger of our deep partisan involvement in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, or indeed any of the other dangers of doing so such as seeing it necessary to invade Iraq and etc.

And yet a mere modest-college freshman who I knew could off-handedly write a paper back in the early ’80’s noting the beyond-rich target environment America presents to terrorists, and their likely ability with even a modicum of thought and capital to just simply tie our government into knots trying to impose security first upon one sort of those targets, and then upon another, and etc. and so forth.

Gee, maybe one ought to think before plunging one’s arm down into a hornet’s nest.